Sea Levels Rise

60pc faster than forecast

At present, sea levels are increasing at an average 3.2 millimetres (0.125 inches) per year, a trio of specialists reported in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

This compares with a "best estimate" by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007, which projected that by today, the rise would be 2 mm (0.078 inches) per year.

The new figure converges with a widely-shared opinion that the world is heading for sea-level rise of around a metre (3.25 feet) by century's end, co-author Grant Foster of US firm Tempo Analytics told AFP.

"In low-lying areas where you have massive numbers of people living within a metre of sea level, like Bangladesh, it means that the land that sustains their lives disappears, and you have hundreds of millions of climate refugees, and that can lead to resource wars and all kinds of conflicts," he said.

“For major coastal cities like New York, probably the principal effect would be what we saw in Hurricane Sandy.

"Every time you get a major storm, you get a storm surge, and that causes a major risk of flooding. For New York and New Jersey, three more feet of water would be even more devastating, as you can imagine," Foster added.

The investigation, led by Stefan Rahmstorf of Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), gauged the accuracy of computer simulations that the IPCC used in its landmark Fourth Assessment Report in 2007.

The new study gave high marks for the document's forecast on global temperature, saying there was a "very good agreement" with what was being observed today, an overall warming trend of 0.16 degrees Celsius (0.28 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade.

But it said the IPCC's projection for sea levels was much lower than what has turned out.

Foster said the bigger-than-projected rise could be attributed to meltwater runoff from land ice, something that was a big unknown when the IPCC reported in 2007 and remains unclear today.

Other factors were technical uncertainty, he added.

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At this stage we have reasons to believe that snow-melt is a major cause for this faster rate of rise in these small island countries; this will also affect Bangladesh and will continue to be a factor. As a consequence, if we can incorporate the dynamic effect of snow-melt in our projection the rise will be faster, resulting in considerably higher than what the World Bank has estimated.

: Md Rashed Chowdhury

Do not cut the trees. Keep them to make boats in the future. The boat party made you independent and so you have to live in boats in the future.